Public intellectual, Rush Limbaugh, wrote a piece for the WSJ wherein he defended the Tea Party movement against their media antagonists. Given liberal hysteria and hyperbole in response to AZ immigration law, this one is timely. (Mind you, I’m not saying I agree with AZ policy, just pointing out liberal hypocrisy.)

Daniel Henninger documents the massive shift in public opinion away from Obama’s vision of America and towards a more limited vision of the role of government. This shift has occurred in a very short period of time. Like, a year.

A new President nearly always gets what he wants on his top legislative priority, especially when he has such big majorities in Congress to work with. Republicans nonetheless managed to keep their Members together, turn public opinion against the bill despite nearly unanimous media support for it, and in the end came a few votes short. They would have won if Mr. Obama and Nancy Pelosi hadn’t been so willing to put so many of their Members at risk by pushing a partisan program and flouting normal Congressional rules.

The GOP’s goal now should first be to remove some of the uglier parts of the bill in Senate reconciliation. Then they need to focus on taking back as many seats as possible this fall. Rather than publicly crowing that ObamaCare will deliver them the Houseâ€”a hard task and a risky expectations gameâ€”they’d do better to concentrate on continuing to educate the public about what ObamaCare is going to do to insurance premiums, federal deficits, taxes and the quality of medical care.

Many Republicans are already calling for “repeal” of ObamaCare, and that’s fine with us, though they should also be honest with voters about the prospects. The GOP can’t repeal anything as long as Mr. Obama is President, even if they take back Congress in November. That will take two large electoral victories in a row. What they can do now is take credit for fighting on principle, hold Democrats accountable for their votes and the consequences, and pledge if elected in November to stop cold Mr. Obama’s march to ever-larger government.

This strikes me as a reasonable approach. The public debate about this bill was won before its passage, but we cannot quit fighting now. Conservatives need to continue to hammer on on Obamacare’s worst features and challenge every Democrat who voted in favor.

The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other “historic” changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

What will it matter if Obama’s current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.

When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats’ control of Congress as well.

The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.

Whatever else you may say about the guy, Bush’s “tax cuts for the rich,” Patriot Act, Iraq War Resolution, and No Child Left Behind all enjoyed bipartisan support. Obama’s (the post-partisan) signature piece of legislation was passed without a single Republican vote and against the will of the American people.

Democrats have revealed themselves as the hyper-partisans they always accused the Republicans of being. This is concrete evidence of that fact.

There is nothing moderate about the Democrat Party.

2:43pm BST: In the NYT’s “Room for Debate” blog, James Capretta, Michael Tanner, Gail Wilensky, Joseph Antos, Megan McArdle, and Keith Hennessey all opine on the GOP’s next move.

President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan. . . .

No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law. . . .

[W]e are in revolutionary times in which the government will grow to assume everything from energy use to student loans, while abroad we are a revolutionary sort of power, eager to mend fences with Syria and Iran, more eager still to distance ourselves from old Western allies like Israel and Britain.

There won’t be any more soaring rhetoric from Obama about purple-state America, “reaching across the aisle,” or healing our wounds. That was so 2008. Instead, we are in the most partisan age since Vietnam, ushered into it by the self-acclaimed “non-partisan.”

Sometimes I get so burned out from reading talking about nothing but slavery and the poor treatment of Native Americans and women in the American History seminar I teach (I have to stick to the syllabus) that finally reach my limit and lash out.

Mind you, America is not perfect. The aforementioned Big Three sins were real. But they aren’t all there is to American History. And it doesn’t help that we are teaching practically nothing more than those three plus the British hobby horse (class warfare) to British freshers who hardly even know who George Washington was.

Just in case the supervising professor on my course (or anyone else from my university, for that matter) read this post let me say up front: I don’t blame them; this is the state of academia.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, sometimes I reach my limit and go on an I-love-America-liberty-markets-free-trading-are-awesome rant.

Like yesterday. We reviewed a bunch of reading that characterized the increased interdependence, division of labor and specialization of the American economy in post-Reconstruction America as horrible because it made the rich richer and the poor poorer and so on and so forth. One article we read trumpeted “economic independence” as an ideal that was somehow lost or never was or some other such nonsense.

That is, in the New South, capitalists from the North built factories to process raw cotton and tobacco and mine and coal and extract and refine iron (later steel) because it was closer to the source (reducing transportation costs) and laborers in the South were much less likely to unionize, thus resulting in lower labor costs.

And all of this was bad, bad, bad.

Missing is the fact that all of these developments brought jobs to the South (where there had been, prior to the Civil War, a lack of industry) and a higher standard of living. The fact that there were now stores near every railroad depot (another feature of post-Reconstruction America) selling goods people hadn’t even imagined before was not a good thing, it was bad because people went into debt to the bad Northern capitalists who produced these goods and duped the stupid poor Southerners into buying them.

The post-Reconstruction period in America is widely considered by economists to be a Golden Age of commerce. Standards of living increased significantly. But the historical narrative is one of worker exploitation, etc. etc.

So I took a moment and tried to teach something about the power of competition and how it both reduces prices and improves quality.

Now the Wal-Mart & Health Care part of the blog post title: Stephen Spruiell made the point last Friday at The Corner that the mere presence of Wal-Mart in the health care industry would improve quality and drive down costs–even for those who never went to Wal-Mart for their open-heart surgery. He’s right. This, my friends, is the power of markets in health care.

Because other people would have to compete with Wal-Mart in supplying health services to individuals, the quality would go up (just as there is Nordstrom) and the price would go down (think of the many different price-comparison websites on the internet).

Unlike Europe, we ought not care about the difference in income between the richest and the poorest so long as the poorest can become richer and the richest aren’t ensconced, by some government diktat, as the ruling class. Indeed, though the spread between richest and poorest may increase, America remains the country where the most people are able to move between the five infamous quintiles on the income scale. By and large, the poorest do not remain the poorest and the richest die like everyone else.

In Europe, regulation, law, and other preferential treatments have resulted in fairly static class organization. The middle class remain the middle class and the upper class remain in the upper class and this continues on, ad infinitum, generation after generation. The modern European welfare state has created, as I point out to my friends who will listen (or at least act as though they are listening) a permanent underclass. In France, for instance, this underclass is populated mostly by Muslim immigrants who, despite the ever-increasing benefits being thrown their way by the French liberal elite, continue to burn cars.

They burn cars not because they want another 10 Euros a week to pay their mobile phone bill, but because the barriers to getting a job and generally breaking into civilized French society (for instance) are for all intents and purposes, impenetrable.

The same is basically true, to a greater or lesser extent, in every other modern welfare Western European state.

This is essentially what liberal utopia (aka social democracy) looks like. The Great Society largely reversed several generations of gains by African Americans (from the Emancipation Proclamation through the Civil Rights movement). Thomas Sowell has shown how African Americans income, education, standard of living, etc., increased right up until liberal good intentions destroyed the African American family and made them America’s permanent under class.

African Americans now vote, practically en masse, for liberal Democrats who, in turn, promise them an expansion of welfare programs which do nothing more than make them, as a people, more dependent on the state and the “good will” of liberal elites.

How to wrap this up? Eric Foner, of all people, wrote about Frederick Douglass’s concerns regarding liberal paternalism in his article, “Rights and Black Life in War and Reconstruction.”

Frederick Douglass himself had concluded in 1865 that the persistent question “What shall we do with the Negro?” had only one answer: “Do nothing…. Give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!” Douglass realized that the other face of benevolence is often paternalism and that in a society resting, if only rhetorically, on the principle of equality, “special efforts” on the freedmen’s behalf might “serve to keep up the very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish.”

America need not make the same mistake as our friends in Europe. Liberty and responsibility are inextricably tied together and our government laws and policies–whether health care or welfare or whatever–ought to reflect that relationship.

Insurance is not medical care. Indeed, health care is not the same as medical care. Countries with universal health care do not have more or better medical care.

We often hear the number–40 million–of uninsured people in the United States as though this were itself a problem begging for a solution. It almost never occurs to anyone that many of these people choose to go without health care–for whatever reason.

The bottom line is medical care. But the rhetoric and the talking points are about insurance. Many people who could afford health insurance do not choose to have it because they know that medical care will be available at the nearest emergency room, whether they have insurance or not.

This is especially true for young people, who do not anticipate long-term medical problems and who can always get a broken leg or an allergy attack taken care of at an emergency room â€” and spend their money on a more upscale lifestyle.

This may not be a wise decision but it is their decision, and there is no reason why other people should lose the right to make decisions for themselves because some people make questionable decisions.

Enough Sowell-quoting. Read the column for yourself. Universal Health Care isn’t about bringing down the costs of health care. I don’t care at all that the UK or Sweden or wherever spend less on health care than the United States. We spend more because (and I know this is going to shock some of you) we want to spend more on health care.

Sure, if you want the country to spend less on health care, give over control of it to government bureaucrats who will ration whatever limited medical options they make available–fewer MRIs, surgery only for the young, 1 drug option instead of unlimited, money for research for drugs which most successfully lobbied members of Congress.

And this is just a short list of things that occurred to me at 1:43am.

I’m not going to argue that US health care is the best it could be. I would argue that though flawed, it is the best in the world and further, that deregulation and simplification of insurance markets and de-coupling health care from employment, etc., etc., would make it even better. Socialization/universalization of health care would make it worse.

Too many Republicans don’t even seem to understand the need to talk. They seem to think it is something you have to go through the motions of doing but, really, they would rather be somewhere else doing something else. . . . Michael Steele not only knows how to talk, but also seems to understand the need to talk. In his appearances on TV over the years, he has been assertive rather than apologetic. When attacked, he has counterattacked, not whined defensively, like too many other Republicans. When criticizing the current administration, Steele won’t have to pull his punches when going after Barack Obama, for fear of being called a racist.

I pulled for Steele to win the Maryland Senate seat back in 2006. It was a tough year for Republicans and Steele (obviously) lost.

2+ years later, he’s making lemonade and I’m glad to have him as RNC chair.

Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending â€œthe anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.â€

He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are â€œinterested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,â€ people who â€œread the classics.â€

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson â€œcould go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book.â€ But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual â€” the form, rather than the substance.

What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model â€” all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear â€” that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.

More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine â€” about the same number as the people killed in Hitlerâ€™s Holocaust.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century â€” far more so than ordinary people.

History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckleyâ€™s view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable â€” or even expert â€” within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.

But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.

(emphasis added)

Just remember: Conservatives are stupid and anti-intellectual and liberals are smart and debonair.

Would it surprise anyone to know that the teenaged girl-like adoration the Obamaniacs have shown The One has gone to his head? I didn’t think so.

The Obamaniacs have fueled the egO-maniac

Thomas Sowell:

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterpriseâ€” whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports teamâ€” is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obamaâ€™s trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League collegesâ€” very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in the real world.

The signs of Barack Obamaâ€™s self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.

The triumphal tour of world capitals and photo-op meetings with world leaders by someone who, after all, was still merely a candidate, is just one sign of this self-centered immaturity.

(emphasis added)

I wish Sowell were on the ballot tomorrow–though not, as some of my euro-phile friends wish, as 3rd party candidate.

This election does not present Americans with a straight-up choice between conservatism and liberalism. This is not so much because John McCain is a moderate, although he is, as because liberals are likely to have effective majorities in both houses of Congress. Thus the choice we face is, in most respects, between a liberalism that is checked and one that is not.

We have no doubt that if McCain is president we will find much to criticize. But we will be confident that we have the right commander-in-chief and that liberals do not have a free hand to remake our country. In this election we support Senator McCain and urge all conservatives to do so as well.

Among the reasons given by Secretary Powell for supporting Barack Obama is that Obama can restore Americaâ€™s standing with foreign countries.

The idea that the United States must somehow rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the United Nations or NATO or â€œworld opinionâ€ is staggering, even though it is an idea very popular in the mainstream media.

The first duty of a President of the United States is to protect American interests â€” of which survival is number one â€” regardless of what others may say.

[…]

Despite the media hype that we need to rehabilitate ourselves in the eyes of the world, the United States of America remains the number one destination of immigrants from around the world, some of whom take desperate chances with their lives to get here, whether across the waters of the Caribbean or by crossing our dangerous southwest desert.

Even when dozens of governments around the world join the United States in coordinated efforts to fight international terrorism, the media will call our actions â€œunilateralâ€ if some demagogues in France or Germany spout off against us.

The American nuclear umbrella has enabled Western European nations to escape responsibility for their own military survival for more than half a century.

Lack of responsibility has bred irresponsibility, one sign of which are unionized troops in NATO and NATO bomber pilots who have office hours when they will and will not fly, not to mention NATO troops letting American troops handle the really dangerous fighting in Afghanistan.

Maybe the time is overdue for NATO to try to rehabilitate itself and for Americans to stop trying to be â€œcitizens of the world.â€

Needless to say, I don’t buy this argument about “rehabilitating America’s image abroad.” They don’t hate us any more now than the “Peace Movement” of the 1980s hated Ronald Reagan. These are the fruits of playing policeman of the world.

McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved â€” the champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing.

Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment â€” a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.

An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.

I have a lot of so-called “moderate” friends. They have always complained about the supposed extreme right-wing nature of Republican politics. Alright, guys, you got what you asked for. John McCain is the most moderate candidate since Bill Clinton. He’s the Republican party’s equivalent of Bill Clinton, minus the womanizing.

Obama proposes a dogâ€™s breakfast of tax credits, including a $500 refundable work credit that applies even to people who owe no income taxes. The Internal Revenue Service would cut them a $500 check every year. This essentially is a government payment dressed up as a tax cut. It will be partly funded by new taxes on the top 5 percent. So Obama is redistributing wealth, but in an eminently salable way. Call it â€œredistributive change we can believe in.â€

Obamaâ€™s plan wouldnâ€™t, like cuts in marginal tax rates, increase the incentive to work, invest or save. In fact, the opposite. As tax credits phase out, they increase marginal tax rates. But for Obama, his plan is a matter of justice rather than economics.

When in a Democratic primary debate Charlie Gibson of ABC News pointed out to Obama that increasing the capital-gains rate in the past has initially reduced revenue, Obama replied that he wanted the increase â€œfor purposes of fairness.â€

But how unfair is the American tax system? Itâ€™s already steeply progressive. IRS data show that the top 1 percent of filers paid 40 percent of federal income taxes in 2006. The top 5 percent paid 60 percent. The top half paid 97 percent.

Robbing the rich to bribe the poor. This is Obama’s idea of “social justice.” Social justice is a joke.

Policies that he proposes under the banner of â€œchangeâ€ are almost all policies that have been tried repeatedly in other countries â€” and failed repeatedly in other countries.

Politicians telling businesses how to operate? Thatâ€™s been tried in countries around the world, especially during the second half of the 20th century. It has failed so often and so badly that even socialist and communist governments were freeing up their markets by the end of the century.

The economies of China and India began their take-off into high rates of growth when they got rid of precisely the kinds of policies that Obama is advocating for the United States under the magic mantra of â€œchange.â€

Putting restrictions on international trade in order to save jobs at home? That was tried here with the Hawley-Smoot tariff during the Great Depression.

Unemployment was 9 percent when that tariff was passed to save jobs, but unemployment went up instead of down, and reached 25 percent before the decade was over.

Higher taxes to â€œspread the wealth around,â€ as Obama puts it? The idea of redistributing wealth has turned into the reality of redistributing poverty, in countries where wealth has fled and the production of new wealth has been stifled by a lack of incentives.

Open your eyes, folks.

If you think you’ve got it bad now under Bush, just wait until you see the craptastic future Obama has in store for you.

Among my friends who support Barack Obama, there are very few who can actually name or describe in any detail, his admittedly few policy prescriptions. In most cases, I know more about what he has said he would do than they do. For them, a vote for Obama, in addition to being a vote for “change” and “hope,” is also a feel-good vote.

Thomas Sowell put it pretty well:

Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend.

It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only donâ€™t want to be confused by the facts, they resent being told the facts.

An e-mail from a reader mentioned trying to tell his sister why he was voting against Obama but, when he tried to argue some facts, she cut him short: â€œYou donâ€™t like him and I do!â€ she said. End of discussion.

When one thinks of all the men who have put their lives on the line in battle to defend and preserve this country, it is especially painful to think that there are people living in the safety and comfort of civilian life who cannot be bothered to find out the facts about candidates before voting to put the fate of this nation, and of generations yet to come, in the hands of someone chosen because they like his words or style.

Whether that feelgoodedness comes from the collective cool transferred to them by the Obama camp (another way Obama is a collectivist) or because they believe the hype and the rhetoric or perhaps even because they think electing Obama will somehow help America get past its history rather than Presidentializing a racial grievance monger–whatever reason they feel good about voting for Obama, my sense is that it’s going to turn into a feel-bad outcome.

Why should we believe a man who promises to cut taxes when, at every opportunity, he has voted to raise taxes or opposed tax cuts?

Why should be believe that a man has any respect for human life when he voted against protecting those babies who, against the odds, survived the abortion procedure and were born alive?

Why should we believe a man will successfully lead our armed forces and protect America when he has demonstrated that politics–winning an election!–is more important than winning a war?–A man who refuses to acknowledge the success of The Surge and would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

Why should we believe that Barack Obama will ever do anything that is unpopular politically for the good of his country, when all he has ever done is voted present?

Why should we believe that Obama will do anything to change the way government is run when, after receiving over $100,000 in campaign donations, he so willingly went along with the Fannie Mae train wreck, opposing any attempts at reform. If you believe Obama will change anything in Washington with respect to earmarks, corruption, kickbacks, etc., you are woefully mistaken.

We have no reason to believe–no rational, logical reason to assume–that Barack Obama will actually do what he has promised or be able to do what millions of people have hoped. Those who vote for Obama, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, cast aside all logic and reason and ensconce themselves in a willfully ignorant, padded room of feel-good platitudes.

Unless you are a far left liberal, then you may be pleased with what you will get.

This is why I don’t want the U.S. to turn into just another European nation. Because their status quo is unsustainable. And because, when I look north, I see what happens when a North American country plays euro-wannabe.

Would that all conservative pundits stood strong (Parker, Noonan, Buckley) like Mark Steyn.

[…]

McCain vs Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then itâ€™s not an â€œideal worldâ€, and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will â€œheal the planetâ€ and those of us who support McCain faute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls â€œa point of no returnâ€. It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, â€œJimmy Carterâ€™s second termâ€, but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation â€” the first being FDRâ€™s New Deal, the second LBJâ€™s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obamaâ€™s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of the last model: forty years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why canâ€™t the government sort out my health care? Why canâ€™t they pick up my mortgage?

In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: â€œI favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.â€ Thatâ€™s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the nanny state: the bureaucracyâ€™s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, â€œunsustainableâ€.

More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany this long is because Americaâ€™s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which western Europe has dozed this last half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?

â€œPeople of the world,â€ declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, â€œlook at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.â€No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people â€” the Barack Obamas of the day â€” were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because â€œthe world stood as oneâ€ but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Senator Obamaâ€™s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because itâ€™s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving â€œfetusesâ€ of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal â€“ ie, the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex â€” voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely â€œpresentâ€?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting â€œpresentâ€, you can stand down.

Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from â€œcommunity organizerâ€ to the worldâ€™s President-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.

Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the â€œNow what?â€ questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama Administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and UN foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a â€œpoint of no returnâ€, the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.